The Waking of Willie Ryan

‘John Broderick explores frustrated life, soured ideals and the pattern of dark religious and anti-religious stupidity in an Irish town … he throws a light of truth and understanding into very dark holes in the Irish spirit … he is one determined and melancholy kind of realist.’ – Kate O’Brien

“John Broderick is not a widely known writer, though that means little as a marker of quality. He is an important writer not only by virtue of his standing as a gay Irish novelist writing, relatively openly, in an Ireland where homosexuality was deeply stigmatised and indeed criminalised, but also because his novels are incisive, sharp and sometimes excoriating explorations of a country in which, as Willie Ryan puts it here, ‘what’s done in the darkness [is not] done at all.’ Seán Hewitt

“[Broderick’s novels] would have made a difference in Ireland. They would have filled a silence about homosexuality that was almost total. It was not merely that homosexual acts between men were illegal; they were unmentionable…. The absence of Broderick’s books meant that rich and complex images of gay people produced by a talented novelist were not available. It was not as though there were other Irish authors dealing with these subjects in the 1960s.” Colm Tóibín